It is known to use metadata within a stream of image and/or video data in order to affect different functionality or improve performance. For example, the following co-owned patent applications are given: (1) United States Patent Publication Number 20110035382, entitled “ASSOCIATING INFORMATION WITH MEDIA CONTENT”, to Bauer and published Feb. 10, 2011; (2) United States Patent Publication Number 20110164113, entitled “CONVERSION OF INTERLEAVED DATA SETS, INCLUDING CHROMA CORRECTION AND/OR CORRECTION OF CHECKERBOARD INTERLEAVED FORMATTED 3D IMAGES”, to Pahalawatta et al. and published on Jul. 7, 2011; (3) United States Patent Publication Number 20110216162, to Filippini et al., published on Sep. 8, 2011 and entitled “MULTI-VIEW VIDEO FORMAT CONTROL”; (4) United States Patent Publication Number 20110219097, to Crockett, published on Sep. 8, 2011 and entitled “TECHNIQUES FOR CLIENT DEVICE DEPENDENT FILTERING OF METADATA”; (5) United States Patent Publication Number 20110222835, to Dougherty et al., published on Sep. 15, 2011 and entitled “APPLICATION TRACKS IN AUDIO/VIDEO CONTAINERS”; (6) United States Patent Publication Number 20120030316, to Dougherty et al., published on Feb. 2, 2012 and entitled “UNIFIED MEDIA CONTENT DIRECTORY SERVICES”; (7) United States Patent Publication Number 20120038782 to Messmer et al., published Feb. 16, 2012 and entitled “VDR METADATA TIMESTAMP TO ENHANCE DATA COHERENCY AND POTENTIAL OF METADATA”—are hereby incorporated in their entirety.
The collection of image statistics—in its wide variety of forms and formats (e.g. histograms, moment invariants, etc.)—in media content to affect processing is described in co-owned: (1) United States Patent Publication Number 20110216937 (the '937 publication), to Radhakrishnan et al., published on Sep. 8, 2011 and entitled “MEDIA FINGERPRINTS THAT RELIABLY CORRESPOND TO MEDIA CONTENT WITH PROJECTION OF MOMENT INVARIANTS”; (2) United States Patent Publication Number 20090086816, to Leontaris et al., published on Apr. 2, 2009 and entitled “VIDEO COMPRESSION AND TRANSMISSION TECHNIQUES”; (3) United States Patent Publication Number 20110164677, to Lu et al., published on Jul. 7, 2011 and entitled “COMPLEXITY ALLOCATION FOR VIDEO AND IMAGE CODING APPLICATIONS”; (4) United States Patent Publication Number 20120027079, to Ye et al., published on Feb. 2, 2012 and entitled “ADAPTIVE INTERPOLATION FILTERS FOR MULTI-LAYERED VIDEO DELIVERY”—and are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety.